- Murder the Internet
The New Yorker has a blog post up about how Jonathan Lethem paid someone to completely remove the internet from his laptop so that he could write without distraction.
You should imagine my computer set-up guy’s consternation when I insisted he drag the Internet function out of the thing entirely. 'I can just hide it from you,' he said. 'No,' I told him, 'I don’t want to know it’s in there somewhere.'"
If you're looking for a way to write fiction without distraction and you don't want to lobotomize your laptop, I suggest you take a look at an Alphasmart NEO. It's a simple, under-$200 battery-powered word processing device that's tough as a Tonka truck. It auto-saves, and it holds about 200 pages. The one problem with it is that the screen only displays about eight lines of text at a time, which makes editing nearly impossible: When you're ready to edit, you have to hook it up to your computer via USB, dump the whole thing into a text document, and work on it the, um, old-fashioned way, which means you are yet again at the mercy of the internet. Still: My NEO is one of the few tech devices that has actually made my life easier. You should consider it before you Lethemize your computer.
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